Learning the network from the access road

The first microwave hop I maintained ran between two hilltops north of Akita, and the hut at the far end had a logbook older than I was. Each engineer who had visited it wrote down the weather, the fault and the condition of the access road. I joined Dewakita Telecom in April 1987, a month after completing a degree in communications and electronic engineering at Yasunagi Institute of Technology. Dewakita was one of the new regional carriers formed after the telephone market opened, and it ran microwave and early fibre trunk routes across northern Tohoku. I learnt from that logbook that a network is maintained by people with limited time and imperfect roads, and that the record they leave is part of the infrastructure.

When Dewakita merged with a larger carrier in 1995 and moved its engineering to Tokyo, I chose to stay in Tohoku. I joined Sorayumi Systems in Sendai, a contractor that installed and maintained transmitters and microwave links for broadcasters. For seven years I worked on other people's networks. I saw how differently stations treated the same equipment: one replaced batteries on a schedule, another waited for alarms. I also passed the first-class technical radio operator qualification during those years, which allowed me to take responsibility for transmitter work rather than only assist with it.

Kazaminato Broadcasting was one of my clients. In April 2002 it asked me to join the team building its digital terrestrial network. Between 2006 and 2010 we built forty-one digital relay stations, many beside the analogue ones they would replace. I learnt to plan a site for its worst access month, not its survey day. Analogue transmission ended in July 2011, four months after the March earthquake had cut mains power across most of the prefecture. Several of our small relay stations went silent that night when their batteries ran down. Nobody was at fault; the design had assumed power would return sooner. That night still governs how I think about resilience.

As manager of relay network engineering from 2010, I led nine engineers responsible for every transmitter site. We added remote monitoring, rewrote winter access plans with the municipalities that cleared the roads, and began recording each engineer's knowledge of a site before that engineer retired. From 2016, as general manager of transmission and network engineering, I also became responsible for the microwave links, extended backup power at twelve priority sites and prepared our first long-term renewal plan.

I became chief technology officer and an executive officer in June 2022. The role covers master control and playout, production engineering, information systems and our news streaming service, as well as the network I had built. I report to the president, present investment and incident papers to the board, and report to our audit and supervisory board members when an outage needs review. I am not a director.

The role also brought work I had not done myself. Master control, playout and the news stream are run by engineers whose skills lie in software and networks rather than transmitters, and several of them are younger than my own career. I spent my first year as chief technology officer sitting with each team through a full shift, asking what failed most often and what they would replace first. Their answers changed the order of our renewal plan, and two of them now present to the board with me.

The hardest part of the role is saying what we will not protect. Our revenue has fallen by almost a quarter since 2008, and a regional station cannot spend like a national one. I would rather tell the board that a small relay station will go dark after eight hours without power than claim a resilience we have not paid for. The decisions I describe on this site each began with that kind of statement, and each was argued over by colleagues whose concerns were reasonable: a news director protecting reach, a finance director protecting cash, an engineer protecting a design she trusted.

I lead through the people closest to the equipment. Our relay engineers know which road floods and which hut loses heating first. I ask them to write down what they know and to challenge a plan before it reaches the board. I also tell them when I have overruled them and why.

I want my next contribution to include a board. I will reach our executive officers' customary retirement age in 2029, and before then I would like to serve as an outside director of a company whose assets sit in difficult places and whose technical staff are becoming harder to replace.

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